


go now go

by firstaudrina



Category: My So-Called Life
Genre: College, Gen, Post-Canon, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 16:15:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18663880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: Angela comes home for Christmas her senior year of college, which is something she does every year, but this is the first time she lets herself listen when Rickie says, “You know, Rayanne’s back, too.”





	go now go

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt at [this ficathon](https://girljustdied.dreamwidth.org/263262.html?thread=7122270#cmt7122270).

Angela comes home for Christmas her senior year of college, which is something she does every year, but this is the first time she lets herself listen when Rickie says, “You know, Rayanne’s back, too.” 

Rayanne went to college in New York, then dropped out, then was an understudy in an Off-Broadway play, then went crazy or something, and now she’s back in her bedroom at Amber’s, allegedly taking classes at Allegheny and working at some bar. Angela’s been at Wesleyan the whole time. She comes back for holidays but stays away during the summer, taking more classes or tagging along with other friends. She can’t stand summers in Three Rivers, the hot asphalt and dripping ice cream of it all, that smell in the air that makes her feel seven years old. 

It’s different in winter. Snow makes everything soft and close, gets Angela cooped up and craving like the old days. So she goes to the bar.

It’s kind of dead, too early in the evening. But the music is playing loud and there are a few pairs of people at tables here or there and Rayanne’s laughter is so loud the second Angela opens the door. She hasn’t seen Rayanne in, like, three years at least. But her laugh is completely the same. Everything about her is the same, from the shirt sliding off her shoulders to the hair piled on top of her head. She’s spinning to the music when she stops dead, a skidding record, and shrieks. “Angelika!” The way she always said it, Ann-jeh-lee-ka.

Rayanne hoists herself onto the bar and then over it, boots squeaking against the polished surface. She races over to the door and envelops Angela in a hug, smacking her lips against Angela’s cheek like no time has passed at all. Up close, Angela sees some things are different; Rayanne’s hair is pin-straight, the caramel wisps in her face getting stuck in her eyelashes. Her lipstick is a pale soft gold.

“Mickey!” Rayanne calls back to the other bartender, who is still behind the bar and laughing at her. “This is my girl!” She takes Angela by the hand and tugs her towards the back of the room. “I’m taking my twenty, bring her a bottle of your best!”

He waves a dish towel at her like he’s heard it all before. 

They sit and Angela immediately wishes she could leave, wishes she’d never come. Her shoulders hunch up under the warm blanket of Rayanne’s gaze. The first thing she says is, “So what about all this Y2K stuff, huh? Think all the computers are going to —” She makes the sound effect. “— explode in a couple weeks?”

Angela huffs half a laugh. “I hope not, I never back anything up.”

Rayanne’s eyes sparkle. “Yeah, that’s right, you’re the new — which one put her head in the oven?”

“Sylvia Plath,” Angela says. “I don’t — I’m not. I’ve just been taking creative writing classes.” Her forehead furrows, lips drawing together. “How did you know?”

“Oh, well, you know.” Caught, she shrugs. “Rickie and Sharon tell me stuff, sometimes.” 

Angela is incredulous. “You still talk to Sharon Cherski? I barely even talk to Sharon Cherski. How does Sharon Cherski know what I’m doing in school?”

But Angela knows exactly how Sharon knows, through the uncontrollable phone tree from mom to mom. They only see each other at Christmas now, sipping punch at family parties and trying not to say too much. They walk that line of sadness and anger and time. 

Rayanne shrugs again, fingers winding together on the table in front of her. “Well, yeah, I still talk to Cherski.” 

It hangs awkwardly. 

“I know it’s, like, totally weird for me to work in a bar. But, hey, I don’t imbibe!” Rayanne perks up, all smiles again. She lowers her voice. “If I did, they’d take it out of my paycheck.”

She never stopped, exactly, not in the time Angela knew her. She just got better at toeing the line, then worse at it, then better again, a dizzying spin of sobriety that took them all the way through graduation. Their last year Jordan was finally gone and everything felt unsettlingly fractured, like Angela was on her own for the first time in her life. She floated through her senior year feeling untethered to anyone. But she wasn’t angry about it, not betrayed or upset. She was relieved, actually. Like she’d been let off the carousel after all. Rickie still called her almost every night and there was the whole thing with Brian Krakow, but otherwise. She drifted. 

Rayanne, though. Rayanne went to the end of her leash and let it snap, two frayed edges hanging in the air. Then college. 

Angela let her hair grow out after her sophomore year of high school. She swore she’d never dye it again, but then at the end of her first month at Wesleyan, when she was losing her mind in a major way, she took over the fourth floor bathroom of her dorm with a box of Clairol. Not red. Deep, dark, dangerous brown. She wore cherry red lipstick all year. A girl in her Intro to American Literature class called her Snow White, and Angela liked that. The lessons of Rayanne Graff kept giving, somehow, long after everything else. 

Angela’s blonde now. Rayanne seems to notice it all at once, reaching out with both hands to tousle her hair. One of her rings gets stuck, a prickling at Angela’s scalp as several strands are yanked loose, making a new home wrapped around the costume-y stone on Rayanne’s finger. “Sorry, babe. I like it so much I tried to rip it right off your head.” Another wavering, watery smile. “Look at you, bombshell.” 

Angela heard that Rayanne is a lesbian or something now. Not in so many words. Rickie said that she was in love with this girl in New York but the whole thing went nuclear. He used those words, _in love_. Angela had never seen Rayanne fall in love with anyone before and the fifteen-year-old part of her is fascinated by the possibility. But older, wiser, whatever, she knows not to dive in. 

Angela tells the story of Rayanne Graff sometimes, in class and out of it, this whirlwind girl who changed her life. But her professors keep saying the tone of her work is too condescending, and her friends just give her one of those raised eyebrow laughs. Like, thank god you got away from all that. “Sounds exhausting,” they say, and it was, but it was so many other things, too. 

Flush with sudden nostalgia, Angela asks, “So how are you? I heard —” And she blushes, guilty of her own game of telephone. “I heard about that play you were in.”

“Oh, yeah, I showed my tits to half the West Village.” She shimmies a little and they both laugh, a popped bubble. “I do some classes at the drama department now. You know, pretend to be a tree, pretend to be a tiger, give a soliloquy.” Her lips part and she smiles, waiting, enjoying it when she adds, “I have a time.” 

Angela feels the words in her bones in a weird way, like tripping and falling into the past. Like the _like’_ s that her professors have tried to train out of her to no avail. 

“Probably won’t stick around here for long,” Rayanne adds. “Are you…after school?”

Angela lifts one shoulder noncommittally. “Maybe for a little while.”

Rayanne coughs into one closed fist and ducks her head so she’s looking up at Angela when she says, “Maybe we’ll run into each other again.”

The music fills the silence. “Yeah,” Angela says finally. “Who knows.”

Rayanne sort of nods, looks away. “Ask me what you want to ask me.”

“What?”

Rayanne raises her eyebrows.

Angela laughs for real, shakes her head, and says her line: “You ever hear about Jordan?”

“Mmm.” Rayanne makes it a purr, her fingers stretching out and curling like a witch casting a spell. “Last I heard he went out to L.A. to do the music thing. Grew his hair out real long.”

Against her better judgement, Angela imagines that long hair tangled in her fingers. “I can see that.”

“I bet you can,” she says playfully, wink wink nudge nudge, and it shouldn’t work, but it does. They laugh again. So much of Rayanne shouldn’t work, but it does.

Once, drunk in the bathroom at the homecoming dance junior year, Rayanne tried to tell her about how it happened with Jordan. How she barely even remembered doing it, that it didn’t feel like anything and she thought about Angela the whole time. The conversation had not gone well. Angela didn’t want to hear it.

Rayanne never goes back to work. Instead, at the end of the hour, she walks Angela outside to the car she’d borrowed from her parents. It’s cold but Rayanne isn’t wearing a jacket, and she shivers. Angela is thinking about inviting her in for a drive, debating how stupid that would be, how much more awkward to be trapped in a car together instead of a wide-open room, when Rayanne speaks.

“Hey, Angelika.” Angela turns just in time for Rayanne’s fingertips to catch in the curls of her hair. She smiles a little before she drops her hand. “Still hurts.”


End file.
